Stronger influence of anthropogenic disturbance than climate change on century-scale compositional changes in northern forests.

ABSTRACT: Predicting future ecosystem dynamics depends critically on an improved understanding of how disturbances and climate change have driven long-term ecological changes in the past. Here we assembled a dataset of >100,000 tree species lists from the 19th century across a broad region (>130,000km²) in temperate eastern Canada, as well as recent forest inventories, to test the effects of changes in anthropogenic disturbance, temperature and moisture on forest dynamics. We evaluate changes in forest composition using four indices quantifying the affinities of co-occurring tree species with temperature, drought, light and disturbance. Land-use driven shifts favouring more disturbance-adapted tree species are far stronger than any effects ascribable to climate change, although the respon

SUBMITTER: Danneyrolles V 

PROVIDER: S-EPMC6426862 | biostudies-literature | 2019 Mar

REPOSITORIES: biostudies-literature